contains music praising
the arrival of spring and especially the month of May. The songs tell us how
nature changes and becomes pleasant, how flowers grow and all troubles disappear,
how beautiful birdsong is. In some pieces, birdsong is musically put into
the composition, 600 years before Messiaen. And naturally, the month of May
is the enchanting period if spring love...

"Ars Nova"

a program presenting the
"new stile" which soon dominated the music of the 14th century. It started
with an angry French priest, Philippe de Vitry, writing a treaty, and
ended far away, on Cyprus, 100 years later. In between a lot of very exciting
things happened: the composers loved to experiment with the new way of writing
music, experiments sometimes not so unlike works of modernists in the 20th
century.

"My end is my beginning"-
Medieval music back and forth.

Most people, both children
& adults, have some time played around with words, trying to read them back
and forth, and some words are actually identical whether you read them the
right way or start from the end: these words are called palindromes.
Of course this was known by the medieval man, and medieval musicians as well!
Playful medieval composers have left quite a few musical riddles to us, some
of them are to be played back-and-forth, some are written in circles (where
does one start?) or other figures and sometime you find a hint how to read
and play the piece hidden in the poem itself!

"Unter der Linden

Here ELN interpret the German
"troubadours" the minnesänger, from Walter to Oswald.

"....where angels
sing...." - Music around Saint Birgitta.

The audience is in this
program invited to join the only Swedish canonized saint, Saint Bridget
(1300-1374) on her tours - through various countries of Europe but also to
the heavenly spheres - by using the saint's own words and music from her time.

"Maria Mater"

This program is dedicated
to the Holy Virgin, who was so much honoured in medieval times.

"O in Italia"

This is a program with Italian
music of the 14th and 15th century: devout praising songs do beautifully blend
with virtuoso music from the "trecento"-period. Amongst composers we
find the famous organist Francesco, later on called Landini,
and among the instruments, the very rare lira da braccio, the instrument
played by Leonardo da Vinci.

Ensemble Laude Novella
does a great deal of performing at schools- as a part of musical education
as well as illustrating historical events or epochs. There are different programs:
As an introduction ELN presents "The Middle Ages at school"
where the ensemble, using a small and handy background, easily moves back
into the medieval period. There one can meet victims of the plague, saints
and pilgrims, one gets to hear jesters' earthbound music and examples of heavenly
sounds from a Swedish monastery.

"Pirates on the Baltic
Sea"

tells the story of the
"Vitalians", a brotherhood which around 1400 ravaged both North sea and
Baltic sea. It all started off with smuggling - Stockholm was besieged by
Danish troops by order of Queen Margareta I, and food had to be smuggled in
to the predominantly German population; and it was all over in 1401, when
the most cruel and famous pirates were executed in Hamburg. In this performance,
the fearful "vitalian" Goedecke Michels turns up - who is Utes' grandfather's
grandfather's grandfather's grandfather's grandfather's ...